Righty. We’re up and running

Right. So I decided to create a blog. Suppose I should introduce myself to those who don’t really know me.

My real name is Kieron Thwaites, but my friends call me Ron for short. Hence my online identity, Ron2K. At the time of writing this post, I’m 21. I’ve just finished studying and I work at a private tertiary institution called CTI, teaching people just out of school how to program in C#. It’s only a three month contract, and I’m already one month into it, but hey, it’s better than nothing 🙂

I live in Durban, South Africa. Spent almost my entire life there (apart from one year when I was at university in Cape Town). There’s not much there in the way of IT jobs though, particularly for C# programmers. As soon as I get enough work experience to earn enough money to live on my own, I’m moving back to Cape Town. It’s a nice place, and there’s some nice jobs there. The other alternative is Johannesburg, but I don’t want to touch that place with a ten foot barge pole…

I’m keen on gaming quite a bit. Unfortunately, at the moment my hardware just doesn’t quite cut it. 1.3GHz Celeron, 32MB TNT2 graphics card… you get the idea. At least I’ve got a job now, so I can upgrade. In fact, my new case (an Antec P180) arrived today, and the motherboard and PSU should be coming later this week, if Chris can organise it. Chris is a friend of mine who has contacts at Rectron (one of the leading hardware suppliers in this part of the world), so I get my stuff through him. Next month it will either be RAM or the processor, depending on price (my desired processor, an AMD 64 X2 4400+, costs more than what I earn each month).

I’m also heavily involved in IRC. Not so much as time spent chatting (I’m still in the dark ages as far as my Internet connection goes, with only a 56K line), but I’m involved in IRC server development. I’m one of about 20 beta testers for UnrealIRCd, which is probably the most popular IRC server out there, for all the small and medium sized networks at least. (Pay attention to all the connect info next time you connect to an IRC server and see what they’re running.) I also sit on the mailing list for IRCServices, which is one of the NickServ, ChanServ, etc. packages. Indeed, on another of my sites I offer a Windows build of IRCServices (which is something that isn’t supported by the developers, but a lot of people request it anyway).

Other than that, I’m keen on my cricket (I’ve worked as a professional paid cricket scorer at Kingsmead – the money that I earned there got me my aforementioned new case), and my music. I was quite into the cultural side of things at school (they gave me cultural honours in my final year) and I’m currently involved with a Christian youth band at my church. I’m Catholic, in case you want to know.

Anyway, that’s all I can think of adding for now. I’ll post back when I have something else to write about.